'Ever watch ferrets having sex?"
I nearly cough out my molars at the kinky question fired at me by the woman with strawberry-blond hair during our tour of her cage-filled barn.
"Hey, I'm an open-minded guy," I tell her, "but I draw the line at ..."
The Nazis are a little more restless than usual in these dark woods that surround Hayden Lake.
The crack and roar of assault rifles and combat shotguns shred the crisp autumn air. Hooded prisoners march single file to the curses and commands of their jackbooted captors.
Ryan Edison is traveling to UCLA this week, hoping to persuade doctors there to OK a second lung transplant. Photo by Sandra Bancroft-Billings/The Spokesman-Review
Roger Stadtmueller makes a living taking people up, up and away in his beautiful balloons.
Some furious ex-customers, who never got their rides or money back, accuse the Spokane man of peddling hot air.
Call me Rat Boy.
Go ahead and howl like a banshee at what an utter dork I look like in my $7 Value Village rodent garb. (See column photograph for embarrassing clip-and-save details.)
I'm thanking my lucky stars, though. My quest for a Halloween outfit at the do-it-yourselfer's costume capital of Spokane could have ended up spookier.
The little dark-haired boy slips from his North Spokane house during the night and runs straight to the storm drains that beckon him.
Oblivious to traffic on busy Ash, his skinny frame bends to examine the openings in the street with fixated wonder.
Lifetime of love. Anita and Dale Maxwell celebrate their 70th birthdays Saturday with a party at the carrousel in Riverfront Park. Photo by Sandra Bancroft-Billings/The Spokesman-Review
Minutes before the city dropped the ax on its arts director for lying on her resume, the actor who helped hire Carolyn Lair gave me a brief command performance on the woman's behalf.
"We're satisfied with the veracity of what she submitted," said Jack Phillips, president of Spokane's volunteer Arts Commission and director of the Civic Theatre.
A tent. Crisp air. A cheery fire. ...
Is there anything so All-American swell as camping in the great Northwest?
"It (granny knot) sucks, man. It (square knot) SUCKS!" shouts an unhappy camper named Patricio Molina. "It just ain't (half hitch) humane."
One nerve-jolting stroll through the Gumbo-Fest "Haunt in the Holler" haunted house and I can't decide which is scarier: "Ghoulia Child" slicing and dicing a live, wailing head in her butcher shop of horror.
Or two high rollers gambling $5 million on turning a seedy section of Spokane into a New Orleans-themed recreation complex.
It's pretty tacky bringing up divorce at a wedding reception, but that doesn't stop us guys.
"Naw, it won't last," says Dustin Cantrell, a 13-year-old Garry Middle School seventh-grader, through a mouthful of cake.
(From Doug Clark's column, October 10, 1996):
In Tuesday's column I mistakenly noted Seattle's Little Bill Englehart as a black blues musician. He is white.
1. Terry Moreau stands next to the streamliner that he drove at nearly 200 mph on the Bonneville Sand Flats. Photo by Christopher Anderson/The Spokesman-Review
2. Moreau has written a memorial to his deceased father on the canopy of his streamliner.
Today's misadventure finds Moby Doug gasping and floundering like a harpooned manatee in the chlorinated waters of the Shadle Park High pool.
He is surrounded by a jeering gang of inhumanly fit teenage girls who hoot with great glee at Moby Doug's love handles.
'What are you, retarded?" The unbelievably rude words hung in the air of a downtown Spokane cafe like the stink of a skunk.
The woman spewing the poison glared daggers at the counterman who was the target of her abuse.
A bouquet of yard-grown roses in hand, the elderly couple crossed the grassy expanse of Spokane's Holy Cross Cemetery on a recent visit to their murdered daughter's grave.
Lucile Zappone gasped.
It's not often that a hard case like me, a man who once had his underwear stolen, is shocked by how low the local lowlifes will go.
But it happened the other day, when I heard about two recent Spokane incidents that are unrelated except for their significant sleaze factor.
The pickup was double-parked on one of Portland's residential streets.
Meter guy Kevin Moore politely warned the owner to move it, but on his next pass the heap was still hogging the road.
